Read France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 Online

Authors: William I. Hitchcock

Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Western, #Modern, #20th Century, #Political Science, #Security (National & International), #test

France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (7 page)

 
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resistance. After July 1940, Vichy placed in power a new generation of technocrats who were convinced of the need for greater state planning and economic management. Vichy technocrats sought to revive industrial production, end the economic disorder brought on by the defeat of 1940, and thus limit the degree of German direct control of the French economy. Though these aims shifted as Vichy grew increasingly collaborationist, Vichy-era experiments with state planning left a strong imprint on postwar thinking. Vichy officials began gathering important statistical data about the economy that had been unavailable in the Third Republic, developing long-term investment plans in crucial areas such heavy industry, and exerting strict control over labor, supplies of raw materials, and production through the use of comités d'organisation. These oversight committees were set up in each industrial sector of the economy and were conceived as a means of placing business, labor, and government on the same path toward productivity and economic renovation  all in the service of Vichy's "national revolution."
26
Within the resistance, economic reform and renovation had become a central plank of the postwar agenda. Still, just as the resistance incorporated diverse political opinions, so too were its proposals for postwar reform equally varied. As historians Andrew Shennan and Richard Kuisel have shown, some groups within the wartime resistance, infused with the socialist ideal, impressed with Soviet-style planning, and keen to oust the bourgeoisie from its position of dominance in the economy, argued for a wide degree of state intervention in the economy, including nationalization of key industries, the democratization of the workplace, and state management of trade. The prewar
planistes
  Philip, Moch, Mendès France  characterized this first trend. By contrast, the brain trust grouped around de Gaulle in London, directed by Hervé Alphand, Etienne Hirsch, and René Pleven, outlined a state-managed economic policy that sought to integrate free enterprise with state planning. In France, the clandestine Comité Général d'Etudes, a nonpartisan, though decidedly centrist, university-based study group, provided the CNR with still more cautious technical and economic advice on a range of topics. Its November 1943 report, prepared by University of Montpellier law professor René Courtin, showed a greater reluctance than many resistance groups to rely on permanent planning mechanisms to direct the economy. As Kuisel writes, these two trends might be characterized as socialist and neoliberal. Divided over the details, both camps nonetheless shared a commitment to see France undertake a major program of renovation and modernization after the war.
27
 
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Despite these fond hopes, however, the period of GPRF rule saw little progress toward a new model of state-managed capitalism. To be sure, the de Gaulle government did move forward in the two years following the liberation with sweeping nationalizations, including transport, mining, gas, electricity, banking, and insurance, creating a large public sector that the state could use to speed recovery. The government made workers' committees mandatory, bringing a greater degree of democracy to the workplace, and laid the foundations of the social security program. But these reforms were by and large the ineluctable consequence of having in the postwar government members of the prewar left and wartime resistance for whom this kind of reform had been an article of faith since at least 1936.
28
On the question of planning and economic management, however, the advocates of an intrusive, government-controlled economy did not prevail, as the postwar experience of Pierre Mendès France demonstrates.
Mendès France was a Third Republic deputy from the Eure who voted against giving power to Pétain in July 1940. Before the war, he circulated among the "Young Turks" of the Radical Party, a group that had called, albeit rather vaguely, for an
economie dirigée
in the face of the crisis of the 1930s.
29
In February 1944, as the commissaire aux finances in de Gaulle's Algiers government, then operating under the tide Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN), Mendès France issued a report on the financial position in which France would find itself after the liberation. He focused on two crucial problems: the weakness of the productive apparatus of the nation, both industrial and agricultural, and the financial chaos that the Germans had created by forcing France to pay the costs of the occupation with francs  money that the Germans then pumped backed into the economy in exchange for goods and services.
30
The lack of production and the swollen money supply were, in Mendès France's view, a recipe for a disastrous inflation on the scale of the German crisis of 192324. His remedy was to increase production and drastically reduce the money supply, both actions that would require total state control over the economy. Thus, a return to economic liberty after the liberation was out of the question. Rather, planning mechanisms had to be established to control raw materials, labor, and investment. To absorb excess currency, he proposed freezing bank accounts and instituting an exchange of notes that would both allow for an evaluation of private holdings, especially useful in identifying war profiteers and black marketers, and permit the government to withdraw temporarily some of the bills presented for exchange. This he thought would
 
Page 26
lead to a more equitable distribution of purchasing power and consumption of ever scarce necessities. In short, the control mechanisms that the French had come to know during the war could not yet be lifted.
31
As minister of national economy after the liberation, Mendès France pushed his view on the need for drastic measures to deal with the economic chaos in which France found itself. Yet he was exasperated by de Gaulle's preoccupation with daily politics and his unwillingness to focus on long-term planning.
32
Worse, he was outmaneuvered by liberals such as Finance Minister Aimé Lepercq, who opposed his policies and instead issued in November 1944 a "liberation loan"  a tried and true Third Republic fallback  as a painless way of mopping up excess currency. Mendès France felt that his ideas for structural reform of the French economy were being ignored. He wrote an open memorandum to the Comité Economique Interministériel (CEI), an economic-strategy-making body that included those cabinet members most concerned with economic problems.
33
He called again for a cessation of cabinet bickering and the promulgation of a coherent overall plan to deal with problems of production and the money supply. He urged the CEI to give issues such as housing and consumption goods less attention than production. "This severe hierarchy constitutes for us a general principle," he asserted. He believed that the people would support a policy of rigor if they knew that it would effect overall change in the long term. France had a chance to initiate a financial overhaul now, he argued, but if the political pressures in favor of a relaxation of wage and price controls were heeded, France would never rid itself of a nagging inflationary spiral.
34
In conjunction with these arguments in the cabinet, Mendès France undertook a series of occasional radio chats that took the thrust of his policy to the people. From November 1944 until March 1945, when he finally resigned, despondent, he called French men and women to support the government in this "third battle of France." He urged his listeners to spend more hours at work, worry less about their low salaries, and think of this as a national duty; he prevailed upon farmers to avoid the temptation of selling on the black market while the cities went hungry. The tone of these extraordinary talks reveals much about the man. Zealous, almost Jacobin in spirit, he believed that a new sense of national solidarity could be forged during this period of privation and sacrifice. "To the central theme of the day  work  must be added sobriety and social justice. There is no excuse," he stated, "there must be sanctions against those who do not have the decency to restrain themselves when
 
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their brethren suffer." But above all, he emphasized the need for planning, for a coherent national strategy of recovery, especially in coal mining and heavy industry, on which a prosperous France could be built. Reminding his audience how far the Soviet Union traveled between 1920 and 1945, he said, "we too are capable of great things; and if we are, as I am sure, the recompense will be glorious."
35
Mendès France's primary, but not only, opponent in the cabinet was an astute young Gaullist from Bretagne, a man considered nonpolitical and centrist in his social philosophy, René Pleven. Pleven succeeded Aime Lepercq at Finance upon the latter's sudden death, and found himself in a raging dispute with the fiery minister of national economy over the means to stimulate production in France. Mendès France's work had become a crusade, not limited to financial and monetary tinkering, but aimed at a complete cleansing of the nation's public and private finances as a parallel to the
épuration
aimed at Vichy-tainted administrators, civil servants, and public figures. Pleven, by contrast, argued for less severity and more compassion with regard to a population that, after years of privation and civil strife, needed to breathe easier and move toward national reconciliation. For liberals like Pleven, the liberation had to mean more than just an exchange of one set of controls for another, equally restrictive and unwelcome. His inclination was to rely on market forces to stimulate production and to follow Lepercq's lead in using government-floated loans to soak up excess currency. Above all, he reasoned, Mendes France's deflationary policy would discourage productivity, thus delaying recovery.
36
"The antagonists," wrote one rather cynical contemporary of this conflict, "present an interesting contrast: Pleven is devilishly persuasive but remains quite devoid of sense, whereas Mendes France has sensible ideas but cannot put them across."
37
Yet this was more than a clash of personalities. Indeed, few debates in the early history of the Fourth Republic have attracted as much attention as this conflict of economic philosophies. The reason is largely symbolic. De Gaulle, in choosing Pleven's approach over Mendès France's, opted for laxity over rigor, reconciliation over justice. France continued to suffer from inflation for years, and Mendès France came to represent a lost opportunity, a symbol in the minds of disaffected
résistants
of the Jacobin justice for which their movement stood. From this point on, France would continue to compromise. Just as the purges were lessened in severity, the reforms of political and economic life were less complete, and the new France more the product of evolution than revolution.
38
 
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The notion of a "lost opportunity" may owe some of its longevity to the subsequent success of Mendès France as the one true statesman of courage that the Fourth Republic produced. His eight-month premiership in 195455 proved the most effective since the liberation, and naturally speculation arose about an alternative course for France had Pleven not been favored by de Gaulle in 1945. This counterfactual tendency neglects the obvious reality that Mendès France's solution in 1945 was politically impossible for de Gaulle to pursue, economically subject to some criticism, and entirely unpopular among the political parties. For de Gaulle, the deflationary plan proposed cutting to the bone an already exhausted population, which could only impede the swift and effective establishment of de Gaulle's own power.
39
François Bloch-Lainé, who was named director of the Treasury in 1947, has pointed out other difficulties. France was simply too large, with too many power centers and too much division in 1945, to carry out smoothly the complicated currency exchange Mendès France advocated.
40
Perhaps most important, Mendès France had no support in the cabinet or from the parties, with the exception of a few Socialists like André Philip and Jules Moch with whom he had agreed since the mid-1930s on the general need for economic planning. Other Socialists in the cabinet opposed him, primarily because he intended to make the Ministry of National Economy the centerpiece of the government's reconstruction effort, a direct threat to other ministries; this was especially true of Robert Lacoste, minister of production.
41
The Communists, too, were opposed, arguing that wage freezes would disproportionately harm the working classes, whose salaries were already pitifully low. Perhaps the Communists also feared a public examination of their finances for, as rumor had it, the party had managed to stash away considerable war profits. Mendés France quipped that the Communists did not help him because "they had no desire that a left-wing policy be carried out by anyone but them."
42
Mendès France may also have been done in by the associations with Vichy that his style of dirigisme called to mind. Indeed, while still in Algiers, he had argued in the CEI that the organizational committees established by Vichy to exert control over the economy would have to be maintained, purged, to be sure, of their personnel. "It seems to me very dangerous," he wrote, "to dissolve these economic groupings just at the moment when the directed economy will necessitate recourse to organs of effective action."
43
In the short term, no doubt, this made sense. To create a new distribution and control structure during the liberation would have been immensely difficult. But as time wore on, it appeared to

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